RIPPLE enjoyed a price boost in the wake of its MoneyGram deal taking a step closer to the world of mainstream finance as rival bitcoin endured another week to forget.
Bitcoin’s top rival, Ripple has further signalled its mainstream intent by signing a deal for transfer service MoneyGram to use XRP to speed up and reduce the cost of transferring money through the cryptocurrency’s network xRapid.
Ripple has bounced back to $2.06 after the game-changing news that South Korea is preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading that affected the entire crypto family.
Ripple has a significant speed advantage over bitcoin, making it more attractive to mainstream firms like MoneyGram. A typical transaction on the XRP network takes between two to three seconds. A bitcoin transaction can take nearly an hour.
MoneyGram said in a statement: "XRP remains the most efficient digital asset for payments with transaction fees at just fractions of a penny, compared to bitcoin fees of about $30 per transaction.
However, bitcoin is struggling, its chief payment problem pivots around stodgy processing times and high transaction fees. Both issues don’t help in the writing of digital currencies as the next latest and greatest innovation in history books of global finance.
Earlier this week the North American Bitcoin Conference, set to be held in Miami next week, confirmed that it has stopped accepting last-minute ticket payments in bitcoin because slow transaction speeds and high fees make paying in bitcoin for bitcoin-related services tedious and inefficient.
The organisers said: "We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the event.
"However, due to the manual inputting of data in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies, we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute sales due to print deadlines."
Huge energy costs, lengthy transaction times and high processing fees for bitcoin payments have led to many merchants to rethink their decision to accept cryptocurrencies.
Microsoft said it would stop accepting bitcoin while Steam, the gaming platform, decided it no longer really worked due to processing times, high fees and incredible price volatility.
But hope is in sight.
The Lightning Network calls itself a proposed solution to the bitcoin scalability problem.
Like p-2-p torrent transfers the solution uses a network to make micropayments of digital cryptocurrency.
The system would be built on top of bitcoin and will let people instantaneously send and receive payments, reducing transaction fees by keeping them off the main network.
It helps bitcoin be more useful as a day-to-day currency.
In January this year, news platform HackerNoon wrote that Lightning will mark the biggest ever change to bitcoin's workings and use potential.
Author, Cory, said: “If it works, it reintroduces bitcoin as a usable daily currency, unhindered by stuck transactions and high fees. This is exciting for the adoption of cryptocurrencies as puts it back on track as a replacement for fiat.”
With bitcoin’s price remaining stagnant at $13,824 and Ripple creeping up to $2.08, lightning is expected to be ready in 2018 and wallet holders could well be in for a shock.